Thursday, April 30, 2015

One
of the clichés of the fantasy novel is the civilized man – usually
white – who in some fashion saves the ‘savages’ he encounters.
We have seen this as recently as the movie ‘Avatar.’

This
fellow has been dubbed the ‘white savior.’ Whether he pops up in
Africa or among the stars, he has been all over fantasy writing since
at least of time of Haggard. (Though to give Haggard credit, the real
hero of ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ is the black man who pretty much
saves them all.) For that matter, one can see it before then with the
frontier romances that featured white men among native Americans.

It
would have been easy to fall into using that trope with ‘Coast of
Spears,’ my soon-to-be-published novel. White guy shipwrecked among
natives (never mind that it occurs in a more-or-less parallel world)
gets involved in their lives and wars. I recognized the perils of
such a scenario and made it my intention from the start that he would
NOT be particularly heroic.

Competent,
yes, but not wanting to take the lead or impose himself — which
contributes some to his problems. Is he the hero? Sort of. He is the protagonist, anyway,
and the point is that he does step up eventually, after being pretty
much forced into it. But first, he is the one rescued on more than
one occasion.

And
he truly saves no one but himself. The native peoples could have
gotten along perfectly well without him.

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There
is another, completely unrelated cliché that pops up in some fantasy
writing and that is the use of the apostrophe in proper names.
Usually this is just to make them seem ‘exotic’ and serves no
actual purpose.

However,
there are languages in our own world where apostrophes are there for
a reason. One sees them in western Africa, for example, or in
Polynesia. This latter has a direct bearing on my novel as one native
nation there is supposedly of Polynesian origin. So a few
pseudo-Polynesian names I coined do have those apostrophes, but only
where they make sense.